From European patent 314 594, a conceptual design tool is known that uses a top-down functional approach for the development of the hardware product. This tool includes an inquiry system that enables the user to input each component of a product. Such a system requires a prior description of the components of the product and consequently is frozen for a single application.
Also known from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 4,964,063 is a method of operating a data processing system with conceptual structures that can be used to represent all knowledge that can be represented by elements such as concept data, relational data, functional calculation bits, knowledge representation function bits and symbolic access code bits. The symbolic access code bits represent the storage addresses of the memory means for the attached conceptual data, the relational data and the function code bits.
This method uses the data processing system to link the concept data and the relational data into conceptual graphs which can be shown on the means of display.
This method provides for a breakdown by unit name, slot name, facet name and class or superclass. Such a method, while it permits a description of certain objects of the conceptual model, does not provide a structure of the model that is a guide for gathering and interpreting knowledge, while permitting the search for modularity, reusability and genericity of the elements of the model. The genericity of a model or parts of a model being the property of furnishing a guide to the knowledge-gathering and interpretation process, so that the process is reduced to "instancing" the generic model, namely adding factual information for the field of application to it.